Turkey’s Politics of Fatigue

By Elif Shafak

Jan. 26, 2015

LONDON — Before a recent interview in Istanbul, I was talking to the journalist about Turkish politics. After about 15 minutes, she looked down and lowered her voice, as though confiding a secret: “It is so tiring to be Turkish sometimes.”

That mental exhaustion is caused for the most part by politics. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his leading cadres have chosen a divisive strategy, pursuing hostility over compromise and a politics of duality over a culture of coexistence. Even the most trivial or absurd questions can provoke heated debate: “Would laughing in public endanger a Turkish woman’s modesty?” “Should Turkish Airlines female flight attendants be allowed to wear red lipstick, and if not, which color might be permissible?” “Should patriotic citizens consume ayran (a yogurt drink) instead of raki?” “Are all female drivers of red cars voting for the opposition party?”

The unbearable fatigue is particularly sharp among liberal intellectuals and women. The liberals do not represent huge numbers of Turks, but they are an important measure against which the Justice and Development Party’s political trajectory can be tracked. When the party first came to power in 2002, liberals supported it. A.K.P., the party’s initials in Turkish, was pro-reform and pro-European Union. It was expected to promote civil liberties, a heartening idea after three military takeovers since 1960, each worse than the previous one. But as the party swerved toward authoritarianism, liberals were cast adrift.

At a New Year’s dinner in Istanbul, I listened to my morose liberal friends: “There are two ways left for anyone who doesn’t sympathize with the A.K.P. today: Either we are going to become foolishly apolitical, or we’ll get to be bitterly political. And if you want to be neither foolish nor bitter, tough luck!”

Some liberals have gone silent, but some stand in sharp opposition, while others engage in self-criticism. “It wasn’t the support for more pluralistic and democratic developments ... where we went wrong. It was failing to see that the A.K.P.’s boundaries would turn out to be so narrow,” wrote the Turkish author and sociologist Oya Baydar. “Those who used to say that the A.K.P. was only pretending to be democratic and would eventually replace military despotism with a civilian one ... have been proved right.”

Today, liberals are viewed with scorn by the anti-A.K.P. camp for being too soft and naïve. “In the end, weren’t they, as were some left-wing intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union, the ‘useful idiots’ of the A.K.P. and Erdogan?” wrote Ariane Bonzon, a French journalist who covers Turkey and the Middle East.

Among Turkey’s nonconservative women — at least half of the 48 percent who did not vote for Mr. Erdogan in the last election — there is a growing concern about the A.K.P.’s meddling in their private lives. In the past, sexist statements from male politicians were regarded as spontaneous outbursts. Today, they are seen as part of a systematic and sinister ideological campaign to confine women to traditional gender roles. After the minister of health, Mehmet Muezzinoglu, visited the first baby born in 2015, he said, “Mothers should not put any career other than motherhood at the center of their lives.”

The backlash was immediate. Turkish women have heard top government officials weigh in on subjects like abortion, cesarean-section deliveries, contraception and style of dress. “I am fed up with all these sexist comments, constantly telling us women how to live our lives,” Ayse Arman wrote in the newspaper Hurriyet. Protests were organized around the country. When I talked about the need for an independent women’s movement and a new narrative of sisterhood to bridge political divides, some conservative head-scarved women said it would be hard to work with feminists since their interests had been ignored in the past.

This reaction speaks to one of Turkey’s greatest obstacles: how the past shapes the future. A sense of victimhood plagues society, and there is a constant cycle of retribution that creates new victims.

After the horrible shootings in Paris at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and amid a rise in both Islamopobia and anti-Westernism, Turkey could have stood as a unifying voice, a modern, democratic, pluralistic Muslim country with a strong secularist tradition. But that is not the prevailing mood.

Mr. Erdogan blamed the West for the killings. “As Muslims we have never taken part in terrorist massacres,” he said. “Behind these lie racism, hate speech and Islamophobia. Games are being played with the Islamic world — we need to be aware of this.”

Those who criticize the government are accused of not being patriotic, or worse, as being pawns of Western powers trying to destroy Turkey. The latest victims include Miss Turkey of 2006, Merve Buyuksarac, who was questioned for insulting President Erdogan on her Instagram account; and Sedef Kabas, a journalist and anchorwoman, who was held by the police for tweeting about a cover-up of a government corruption scandal. One of the country’s most popular actors, Tamer Karadagli, said, “Artists, businessmen ... we are all scared.”

The fatigue lingers. The gap between Turkey and the West widens. If as Turks we cannot find a way to embrace the ideals of free society, open debate, pluralistic culture and gender equality, it won’t be just a failure of democracy, it will also be a failure of imagination and will.